Just in case there was any confusion, we would like to assure everyone that all blogs here on Tonic are written by real, live individuals. Why are we pointing that out? Because apparently that’s not a given anymore now that Ada and Grace have entered the blogosphere.
Who are Ava and Grace? Well, they just happen to be two virtual humans brought to “life” by the super-smart folks at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies and the Museum of Science, Boston as part of a National Science Foundation-funded public education project aimed at getting young people aware of, interested in and excited about science, technology, engineering and math.
Oh, and they blog, too.
The almost-humans kicked off their blog this month with a post about Women’s History Month — quite apropos because the pair were named after two very real, very talented women of science.
As these virtual ladies explained in their blog, Grace Hopper was an officer in the US Navy back in the 1940s who worked as one of the first programmers on the Mark I computer, the first automatic digital computer, which has been credited as ushering in the dawn of the modern computer age. She created the first compiler and was instrumental in the development of the programming language COBOL. You go, girl!
Meanwhile, Ada Lovelace made her mark way back in the 1840s and has been called the world’s first computer programmer. She had a fascination with numbers and saw their great potential eons before most of her peers.
Kinda like the folks who created virtual Ava and Grace, who make their home at the Museum of Science, Boston, and use artificial intelligence to answer visitors questions.
So kudos to Ava and Grace for their blog — just don’t make us human bloggers look bad, OK?
Photo by vierdrie via stock.xchang.
